Typical, isn’t it? Here I am, writing a long entry on why I haven’t been writing much and probably won’t be writing much in the near future and then with no warning I break out all rambly and verbose and feel like carrying on this odd conversation with the sometimes polyphonic but mostly unresponding-like-a-wall entity that is “y’all”. To whom, precisely, am I talking? Do I really want to know? Does it really matter? If it matters, does the fact that it matters actually matter?
I must be coming down with something.
Or is Jane’s RL friend (friend? Enemy? Significant other?) correct, is this not communication? Actually, it is communication. All writing is communication, though a lot of it is the writer communicating with him/herself. This blog, however much it’s me talking to myself, is undisputably also communication with other people. I know for a fact that people read this. In some cases I even know who my readers are. The rest of you: you’re very welcome (though I do like comments…) When I write, I may not write for a specific reader, or rather, the reader I write for is not actually a real-life person but a sort of conglomerate of several, known and unknown, but I am still conscious of the specific readers I know about (not to mention the ones that may drop in as a result of some specific searches). So you could say that some of this is like e-mail, written with a certain person or certain people in mind – or an e-mail to a mailing list, if you will, private and public at the same time. Other parts are more like a message in a bottle, thrown to the winds for whomever happens to pick it up to read.
To be honest (odd phrase, really, it sort of suggests that I have not been honest so far, which is not strictly true), I don’t really care whether this is communication or not. I feel like writing, so I do. Now for the thing I was intending to ramble on about:
I have been contemplating ex-boyfriends and near-but-never-quite-boyfriends lately, and re-analyzing what went wrong with what I thought I was feeling. I have a recurring problem with falling in love with love – when it happens, the person in question is more or less accidental, it could be any decent, available bloke that happens to be around at the time. Which is the problem. Not only do I mess up my own emotional life by convincing myself that I’m feeling more than I really am, but I mess up other people as well. Which is not nice. As I think I’ve mentioned, I tend to end up not liking myself very much for a while. I’ve also lost some (potential) good friends that way, which is definitely not good.
The pertinent question being, obviously, am I doing it again? A: Probably. Q: Am I actually doing the “sensible” thing and concentrating on the friendship part and “see what happens”? A: Unlikely. Q: Will I, again, try to hurry things along a path they were not meant to take? A. In all probablility. Q: Will I over-analyse everything? A. Indubitably. Q: Despite over-analysing, will I still end up in a “what the hell was I thinking?” situation? A: Beyond all reasonable doubt.
Q: Knowing all that, is there anything I can do to behave more sensibly? A: We’ll see…
For all I know it’s an irrelevant point anyway, I think he’s available, but he may not be. He may be married, for all I know. He may be gay (aren’t all the best men gay?). He may be sworn to celibacy. He may just be “friendly, but not interested in that way, you know”. All of which is fine*, really, as long as I don’t embarrass myself completely. I do really mean that bit about needing friends more than boyfriends (or, at least, more friends than boyfriends), you know. If it turns out he’s just really bad at sending signals and he actually detests me, then that’s a pity, too, but there’s hardly anything I can do about it. Could anyone be that bad at sending signals, I wonder?
Voice in my head: Avril something or other – too late to think…
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*Look, footnotes! What I meant to say “Married” (or equivalent) is fine to a point, it does not exclude friendship, obviously. However, I am not very impressed by people “acting single” if they are not. It is unfair on their partners and it is unfair on the rest of us. So if he turns out to be married it will lower my respect for him, and that might be an obstacle to friendship (I tend to need to respect people).